Friday, November 1, 2013

A shitty day!

Well....well....well. This is the well pump house and it has a layer of water in it which refuses to go away, so I took a metal rod and poked it down the drain hole to try and unblock it. It did not reach the end, so I went and got a longer rod and still it was not long enough. So I went and got another rod, it was now 3m long, and it was still not long enough. So I went and fetched another pipe, this one was about 40m long and this was long enough to reach the blockage but I could not shift it. I had about 5m left of the pipe and thought that this was a very long drain pipe. So I thought about it, and guessed that maybe it joined up with the septic tank outlet pipe. So then I went to have a look at the end of the exit pipe.

This is what I found:

You can make out the white disk in the bottom of the ditch. This is the blocked pipe. So I went and fetched a metal rod to clean out the pipe. (By now I had walked 100km backwards and forwards to the barn!) But it was really blocked, and very dry. No water had come out of this for a while. I went to ask a man in the village if he could come and help dig out the pipe and he turned up the next day. Here are 2 of the pipes we removed. They are very compacted.

So we dug.....and dug.....and dug. The dog got bored of us digging.....can you see her in this photo below?

We were getting closer and closer to the house.....

Then it started to get damper...then suddenly I did not want to be in the ditch any more! I am so glad that we hardly use the toilet. It is only our soft guests which use it!!! We use the earth toilet located outside by the barn.

A new river....... I had just done 4 loads of washing so there was a large amount of water in the system....

The helper went and fetched some pipes and they connected a converter kit to a new concrete pipe and shrank it around it's washer with a gas torch.

Then we connected some new plastic pipes. We gave up removing the old pipes. They were solid. This has not worked for many, many years!

About Us!

We are mostly self sufficient growing our own meat and vegetables, which taste delicious! We are interested in producing our own electricity and constructing interesting and unusualprojects. You can read older posts here. Welcome to our world :-)